Pope Leo XIV, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and the love that the liturgy requires
Monday, June 1, 2026
*Fr. Richard Vigoa
On Wednesday, May 27, 2026, in Saint Peter’s Square, Pope Leo XIV stood before the faithful gathered for the weekly General Audience and continued a teaching project he has been building for months.
The project is a systematic catechesis on the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and the document under consideration that morning was Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.
It was his second catechesis on that text in two weeks. The first had treated the liturgy as the place where the Church encounters the Paschal Mystery of Christ. The second turned to a more delicate question: how the Church holds together fidelity to tradition and openness to legitimate progress, and what this means for the priest who stands at the altar.
The line that traveled across Catholic media within hours was the Holy Father’s exhortation: “I therefore urge all those called to prepare the celebration of the divine mysteries, in particular priests who exercise the ministry of liturgical presidency, to always uphold that respect for the texts and regulations of the liturgy which springs from an inner attitude of openness and trust in God, manifesting humility before His greatness and sincere fidelity to ecclesial communion.”
It is a sentence that deserves to be read slowly, because every word in it is doing work. But before we examine what the Pope said, we must ask the harder question: why is he saying it now, and why does it matter?
I write as the Director of the Office of Worship for our Archdiocese, but more importantly as a son of the Church who loves the Sacred Liturgy with all that I am. What follows is an effort to set this teaching in its proper context, to honor the chain of authorities the Holy Father himself invoked, and to invite my brothers and sisters in the Faith into a deeper love for what the Church has handed us.
Pope Leo did not invent this teaching on May 27. He stood in a line that stretches back through Saint John Paul II, the Council Fathers of Vatican II, and Pope Pius XII, all the way to the Cenacle in Jerusalem. The Holy Father is the most recent voice in a conversation the Church has been having with herself for two thousand years. To understand what he said, we must hear the chorus of which he is part.
The Church’s living tradition
The Pope began his catechesis with Pius XII’s great 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei, the first comprehensive papal teaching on the sacred liturgy in modern times.
Pius XII wrote that the Church “is without question a living organism, and as an organism, in respect of the sacred liturgy also, she grows, matures, develops, adapts and accommodates herself to temporal needs and circumstances, provided only that the integrity of her doctrine be safeguarded” (no. 59).
The Church is a living organism. The liturgy is alive. It grows. It matures. It develops. But it does so the way every living thing does: organically, slowly, through cooperation between root and branch, never by the snap decision of a single hand wielding a pair of pruning shears. And it grows, Pius XII insists, only when the integrity of her doctrine is safeguarded.
From Pius XII, Pope Leo moved to Sacrosanctum Concilium itself, promulgated by Saint Paul VI on December 4, 1963. The Constitution offered the Church a teaching of breathtaking balance, captured in a phrase the Pope quoted directly: “That sound tradition may be retained, and yet the way remain open to legitimate progress” (SC, 23). Sound tradition. Legitimate progress. Both held together. Neither at the expense of the other.
The Holy Father then turned to Pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2011 address at the Pontifical Athenaeum of Saint Anselm grasped this principle with characteristic precision. “Tradition and progress are often clumsily opposed,” Benedict said, “whereas actually, the two concepts merge: tradition is a living reality, which therefore includes in itself the principle of development, of progress. It is as if to say that the river of tradition also carries its source in itself and flows towards the outlet.”
This is what the Church means by living tradition. The substance of the Mass that the apostles celebrated is the substance of the Mass we celebrate on Sunday morning. The forms have developed, as forms must over two thousand years, but what is essential has not changed. Benedict’s image of the river is exact. The same water still flows.
Pope Leo then cited Saint John Paul II’s profoundly Eucharistic 1980 letter to priests, Dominicae Cenae. John Paul wrote of “a very close and organic bond” between the renewal of the liturgy and the renewal of the whole life of the Church. He continued: “The Church not only acts but also expresses herself in the liturgy, lives by the liturgy and draws from the liturgy the strength for her life” (no. 13). When we tamper with the liturgy, we are not tampering with a ceremony. We are tampering with the place where the Church draws her strength.
This is the chain of teaching. Pius XII in 1947. The Council in 1963. John Paul II in 1980. Benedict XVI in 2011. Leo XIV in 2026. Five witnesses, one voice, one teaching.
Why Pope Leo is emphasizing this now
A reader might reasonably ask: if this teaching is so old, why is the Holy Father returning to it now? The answer lies partly in the nature of the papal office and partly in the condition of the Church.
Popes do not preach on what is already universally lived. They preach on what is being forgotten, what is being misapplied, or what the present moment particularly needs to hear. When Pope Leo says, sixty-three years after Sacrosanctum Concilium was promulgated, that priests should respect the texts and norms of the liturgy and not change them on their own initiative, he is not announcing a new doctrine.
He is naming something that the Council itself anticipated and that decades of pastoral experience have made unavoidable. Sacrosanctum Concilium, in paragraph 22, had already declared that “no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.” The Pope is reaffirming what the Council Fathers, with prophetic foresight, had already written.
The Holy Father’s concern is not aesthetic. It is theological. It is rooted in the most fundamental principle the Church has for understanding her own worship. The Latin formula is lex orandi, lex credendi, which means: “the law of prayer is the law of belief.” How the Church prays expresses what the Church believes. Change the prayer, even with the warmest pastoral intentions, and you have begun to change the belief, whether you intended to or not.
This is why the Council Fathers in Sacrosanctum Concilium took such pains to distinguish between two kinds of elements in the liturgy. There are, the Constitution teaches, “immutable elements, divinely instituted,” and “elements subject to change which not only may but ought to be changed with the passage of time if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become unsuited to it” (SC, 21).
Some things in the Mass are not the Church’s to revise. They are received. Other things may legitimately develop, but only by ecclesial discernment, never by individual decision. The Council’s careful phrasing in paragraph 23 captures the discipline: “any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.”
The river flows, but it does not change its source.
The liturgy belongs to the Church
The deepest question raised by the Holy Father’s catechesis is not what priests must avoid. It is what priests must love. Fidelity to the liturgy is not a regulation imposed on a reluctant clergy. It is the natural expression of love for what the Church has been given.
Consider what the Pope actually said in his concluding exhortation. He did not say, “Respect the rubrics because they are the rules.” He said, “uphold that respect for the texts and regulations of the liturgy which springs from an inner attitude of openness and trust in God, manifesting humility before His greatness and sincere fidelity to ecclesial communion.”
Notice the order. Openness comes first. Then trust. Then humility before the greatness of God. Then fidelity to communion. This is not a checklist of clerical compliance. It is the description of a heart in the right posture before the altar.
A priest who follows the rubrics out of mere obedience is doing the right thing for an incomplete reason. A priest who follows them out of trust in the greatness of what God is doing through them, and out of love for the communion of the Church that hands them to him, is doing the right thing for the right reason.
And the people in the pew, in some way they may not be able to articulate, can tell the difference.
When the priest disappears into the rite, when he says the prescribed words with reverence and care, when he lets the silences be silences and the gestures speak for themselves, the people are not deprived. They are freed. Freed from the burden of attending to the priest’s personality. Freed to encounter not the man but the action of Christ. Freed from having to know, week to week, what the Mass will look like, because the Mass belongs to the universal Church and is the same Mass being offered everywhere on earth that morning. That stability is not a constraint. It is a gift.
The Eucharist is not, and has never been, the priest’s private property. The priest stands in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, but he stands there as a servant, not as an author. What he hands the people is not his own. He received it. He hands it on as he received it. That, more than anything else, is the discipline that fidelity to the liturgy asks. It is also, more than anything else, the freedom that fidelity to the liturgy gives.
A treasure received, not invented
I want to close with a thought that I hope will frame everything Pope Leo XIV has said in these recent weeks. The Holy Father’s catechesis is not a reprimand. It is an invitation. An invitation to fall in love, again, with what the Church has handed us. An invitation to discover that the rubrics are not a cage but a trellis, the structure on which the life of grace climbs and flowers. An invitation to receive the Mass, every time, as the gift it actually is.
The river of tradition flows on. It carries its source within itself. May we, in this Archdiocese and in every parish where these words may be read, drink deeply from it. May our priests preside with the reverence and humility the Holy Father calls them to. May our people be drawn ever more deeply into the mystery that is offered at every altar in the Catholic world this Sunday morning. And may we all, in the words of Saint John Paul II that Pope Leo quoted, draw from the liturgy the strength for our life.
The Church has handed us a treasure. Saint Paul reminded the Corinthians that we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing power may be seen to come from God and not from us. He was speaking of the Gospel entrusted to the apostolic ministry, but the principle extends naturally to the liturgy, which is the Gospel enacted.
The treasure is divine. The vessels who carry it are clay. That is the discipline the Holy Father is naming for us, gently and gravely. Receive what we have been given without revision. Celebrate it with care. And recognize, every time we approach the altar, that what we hold in our hands is not a duty to perform but a Lord to adore.
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